


Brothers in Arms

by SegaBarrett



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: 5B, AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 03:54:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2837129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jesse isn't the only one Todd has collected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brothers in Arms

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Breaking Bad, and I make no money from this.

Jesse opened his eye, the one that wasn’t swollen over, and took a gaze around his cell. It was dark and cold. He didn’t know how long he had been there, but he didn’t think it would be for very long. They had the information they needed, they knew everything he had told Hank… They could get rid of the “rat” soon. The state Jesse was in, he almost welcomed the thought.

Peace. Sleep. He’d be back with Jane, he’d be…

“Hello?”

Jesse tried to turn his head, which filled it with an ache worse than any migraine he’d ever had. He whimpered.

“Is there someone else here?” the voice continued. It was a higher voice, that of a boy or a young teenager.

There was a little bit of light coming through the grate, and the person who was there with him stepped into the light. Jesse sucked in a breath. He might as well have been looking at a ghost.

Red-rimmed brown eyes looked out at Jesse under matted auburn-red hair. Drew Sharp.

He’d been sure that Todd and Mr. White had left him for dead, even though he had pleaded for them to take him to the hospital. His parents were still looking for him; Jesse watched the news coverage as often as he could stomach it.

He’d told Hank and Gomez about Drew…

And here he was.

“Drew Sharp,” Jesse whispered. The kid nodded.

“You were there that day,” Drew told him. “When I was on my bike.”

“You’re alive. I thought… Oh God.” Jesse moved into a sitting position, listening to the chains clank together. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

“A little,” Drew said quietly, “They won’t let me go home. They stitched me up though.” He pointed to a big bandaged that concealed where the gunshot wound had been. “But I have to do stuff for them.”

Jesse’s blood chilled.

“Like what?”

“Clean their… clubhouse they call it. I help Todd do chemical; stuff. Clean up after them. Uhhh… Todd does kind of weird stuff, like, we play football… watch movies… I think he’s… lonely or something. Like he wants to be friends but doesn’t get how it works.

Jesse looked at him.

“I’m going to do my best to get us both out of here, Drew. Your parents are going nuts looking for you.”

Drew shook his head firmly.

“They’ve got a photo up. My parents. They know where they live. They’d hurt them if I left. I’ve got to stay.”

“But Drew… I mean… you’re only fourteen. That’s… that’s the rest of your life.”

Drew looked around and took a seat on the mattress.

“Fifteen. I think I’m fifteen now.”

***

There were two pictures up on the wall, side by side. One was of Andrea and Brock, walking down the street, unaware that they were being followed by…  
Jesse’s heart broke as he looked at it. He wanted to throw up. But he also wanted to keep looking at it, to touch it, to remember that they were out there and, oh God, please let them be safe…

The second photo was of a man and a woman, redheads like Drew, sitting on chairs in a backyard. Looking out into the distance… Maybe looking for Drew.

The boy’s eyes looked as if he had been crying every single day since he had arrived here.

There were a few bruises on his face. He told Jesse that Jack had gotten tired of waiting for his beer.

Jesse’s job was to cook, and Drew watched him. He helped him, brought him things. Drew didn’t have chains; he was allowed to move freely, at least that was the illusion.

Jesse wished Drew didn’t have to be here as he cooked. He knew the chemicals must be affecting his lungs. But it was still better than him up in the clubhouse, getting smacked around.

“Can you bring me some water?” Jesse asked him quietly. The boy returned a moment later with the half-bottle of water, the sole amount Jesse was given each day. He had to ration it; he usually tried to lay off it as much as possible so he could give Drew what he had left over.

He took a drink. It always tasted salty, or like they’d dissolved Alka-Seltzer in it. Maybe they did it on purpose, as another way to taunt the rat.

But now there was another one – if he escaped alone, he would be leaving Drew to face this hell. If the kid wasn’t killed as a punishment, that was, or to get rid of evidence before Jesse came back with the police. 

No, if they found a way, a surefire way, they had to take it together.

He set the cook to settle and looked over at Drew.

“Doing okay?” he asked, even though he knew the answer couldn’t be anything good.

“I’ll be okay,” Drew replied, “I don’t feel bad for me… just… for my parents. They must be going crazy. I never left them for longer than sleepover, and here it’s… months.”

“We’ll get you out of here,” Jesse promised. “I swear.”

***

“You think they have cameras down here?” Drew asked him one day, peeking around after the end of a cook. “Maybe they record everything we say. Maybe it’s like that book we read in English – 1984, where they can even figure out what you’re thinking.”

Jesse shivered. That wasn’t a thought that he had particularly wanted in his head, the mental image of Todd creeping in on his innermost thoughts – he knew that if the blonde could, he’d probably reach in and stroke them like Jesse was a cat, but he’d stroke too hard and there would be damage everywhere while Todd stood there looking a mix of confused and annoyed.

“I don’t know if they’d be able to put them in down here,” Jesse replied, thinking about how Mr. White had always suspected that there might be cameras at work in Gus’ lab, until the day that there actually were. 

“But there’s probably cameras somewhere,” Drew continued, “So we would have to figure out how to disable them.”

“But we’d have to get close enough to them to be able to do it,” Jesse pointed out. “And if these cameras have a feed, well… they’d spot us before we got close enough to actually be able to do anything.” 

Drew intertwined his fingers with each other and looked at Jesse.

“There has to be a way, though. We can’t just stay here forever.”

“You can’t,” Jesse agreed. “But I can.”

Drew ogled at him. 

“Don’t you have anyone out there that you want to go home to?”

“Yeah. But they’re in that photo on the…the thing…” Jesse found himself choking up. “I couldn’t let them get hurt on my account… All they ever did was care about me. And now they’re in danger and I can’t… I can’t have that…”

Drew looked at him.

“Yeah, and so are my parents. But what do you think they’d say if they knew we stayed here with these assholes getting beat up on their account? My parents would wish they were dead if they knew I died in this place. And I figure that your folks would, too. So we’re back to, we need a fucking plan.”

Jesse’s eyes went a little wide.

“You know, there’s a mouth on you, kid.”

“I’m fourteen,” Drew said dryly. “Comes with the territory.”

“Or fifteen,” Jesse pointed out. He shuffled his feet. “I’ve got a kid brother a couple years younger than you, you know. But I can’t see him out riding around on a dirt bike in the middle of the desert. He’d rather be at home studying. At least… the last time I saw him, it seemed like that.”

“When’d you see him last?” Drew asked, curiously. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters. It’s just…” He trailed off, letting out a sigh. “It’s just me. I don’t know if my parents couldn’t have any more kids or didn’t want any more kids or…” He thought for a moment. “Oh God. I read this horrible book once about this little girl who got kidnapped when she was ten and eventually her parents had a replacement kid and the guy holding her hostage threatened to kill them all and they didn’t even know she was alive.”

Jesse blinked.

“I’m kinda glad I didn’t read a lot as a kid, now… Thanks.”

Drew burst out laughing.

“That isn’t even the worst of it! I read a book where four kids were hidden up in an attic so that their mother could gain an inheritance… and eventually the brother and sister started sleeping together!”

“I think I heard of that one,” Jesse replied with a shudder. “And that book was for kids?”

“Well, I guess it was,” Drew replied. “The girl I liked read it, and I wanted to be cool and for her to like me, so I read it too.”

“So you read a book?” Jesse asked. “I guess maybe I should have done that to impress girls when I was in school. I didn’t really… read. Or impress girls.”

“Really?” Drew asked. “But… I mean… you seem pretty cool. You seem like a neat person.”

“Neat?” Jesse asked with a snort. “Neat is what people call like… old ladies or something. I must have lost all my cool points with the crazy kids these days. Or should I be riding a motorcycle that’s been lit on fire?”

“That would be pretty cool,” Drew admitted.

Jesse chuckled, and for just a moment he felt like he was giving some kind of inspirational talk as part of one of those Big Brother programs instead of talking to the person he was being held captive with by Nazis.

Jesse sighed.

“We can’t just stay here.”

Drew nodded.

“But we can’t mess up. We have to make our escape count. You know, after all this time… I’m starting to not care about their threats. Yeah, I’m afraid they might make good on it, and I’m afraid that I’d be the cause of anything happening to my parents, but… there’s a thing.”

“There’s a what?”

Drew looked down.

“There’s a saying. Children are supposed to outlive their parents.” He shuffled his feet.

Jesse nodded, but he didn’t think he believed that in his case. He would be dead long, long before his parents bit it, and it seemed only right that it should be that way. Not Jake, though – Jake needed to outlive all of them so that he could cure cancer and be the President and make life better for everyone because Jake was smart and good and that was what he needed to do. He needed to redeem the Pinkman name.

“So I’m not saying… God, if anything ever happens to them, I don’t know what I would do. I would just be lost. But I can’t… Part of me feels like… that to die on them would be worse. They would… they’d die themselves not ever knowing what happened to me.”

Jesse looked down, his heart feeling broken.

“That’s what I… was thinking. After what happened, watching your parents on the news… when I thought that you were dead. They’d promised to get you to a hospital but I didn’t believe a word they said, not anymore.”

“So you thought they just took me somewhere and let me die?” Drew asked.

“I don’t know if that would have been better or worse than what happened,” Jesse replied sadly. “I had no idea that they’d do something as fucked up as this. This is some serial killer shit.”

Drew flexed his leg and paced around Jesse.

“Guess I should be glad that they aren’t dressing me up in a skirt and calling me their wife?”

Jesse looked horrified.

“Yo, Drew, don’t joke about shit like that. That’s horrible. That’s not cool.”

Drew rolled his eyes.

“Considering the circumstances, Jesse… I don’t think tact is the important thing here.”

Jesse looked away.

“You sounded a lot like somebody, just now.”

“Who?”

“A guy I used to know.”

***

“What if we killed them all?”

Jesse turned over in his bed and stared at Drew.

“Huh? What?”

“Just what I said.” Drew ran his tongue over his lips and put his hands at his side. “What if we found a way to kill all of them. Then they couldn’t do shit. We’d be free. Both of us. And they couldn’t come after our families, either. Dead men don’t tell tales.”

“You’re talking about killing a whole compound full of people. You know you can’t come back from that, right?” Jesse’s look was grave. “You know that once you kill a man, it eats at you for the rest of your life.”

Drew rubbed at his brow.

“Even if you did it to save yourself?”

Jesse looked down.

“Even if you did it to save someone you care about even more than yourself. Kid, don’t talk like this, okay? I never want to see you become that. I want you to be better than that. You can be better than that.”

“What’s the point in being better than that if we’re down in a hole, Jesse?” Drew looked at him inside. “I’m not going to become some kind of murderer. I’m not going to… go all Dark Side or whatever you think is going to happen. We just shoot our way out somehow… I don’t know how yet, but we’ll figure something out… and then we just go back home and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.”

“Kid,” Jesse started, “I wish it could be like that. But it’s… I don’t think it is. It’s just… it’s not ever going to be like it was.”

“I think you’re just… you don’t want it to be like it was,” Drew accused. “Because you think if you get up every day after and you’re not hating yourself, then you’re a bad person. But you’re not.”

“What am I then? Drew, I’ve killed a man. More than one.”

Drew shrugged.

“You’re a man that’s alive and they aren’t. Apparently you’re not a crazy serial killer, because you haven’t killed me yet. So you know what? I’m not afraid. And I still say it’s our only shot. So you can either be with me or against me, but this is the last day I spend in this hole.”

***

Drew sat on the ground, cross-legged, hands clasped together and eyes closed. He was breathing slowly, and he looked to be meditating or something. Jesse knew, however, that he was hatching some kind of a plan. Jesse only wished that he could talk the boy – no, the younger man, for Drew had ceased to be a boy quite some time ago – out of it. He remembered the Jesse of before Gale’s death and the Jesse that had emerged afterwards, broken and cracked. If Drew could at least keep his honor, if not his innocence…

“We can’t do it,” Jesse told him again. “I’m not going to let you do it.”

“You can’t be the boss of me, Jesse,” Drew told him. “You keep looking at me like I’m a kid. I’m not a kid anymore.”

Jesse thought of Tomas. He had been even younger than Drew, and he had killed Combo. In fact, he’d probably killed more than one person. But Tomas had still been a kid. God, Tomas had died a kid. And Jesse had thought that Drew had, too. Would that have been better than this?

“I’ll do it,” Jesse whispered, shutting his eyes tight. “If anyone has to do it, it has to be me.”

“Why do you have to fall on your sword for both of us?” Drew asked, “You don’t even know me, I mean, you didn’t know me. Not before this. It’s not like you’re indebted to me or whatever. After this we’ll both just go back to the people that we were before. I don’t know why you think it’s so hard to do. I’m telling you… I’m gonna sleep just fine, Jesse. I will.”

Jesse didn’t have the words to explain it to him. He only had the action.

He sat down and crossed his legs. He sucked in a breath.

“What are you gonna do, Jesse?” Drew asked. “You have to talk to me.”

Jesse held his hands up. They were the only weapon he had.

He could hear them in the distance. Footsteps.

He would wait. And an end would come. He didn’t know what kind of end. But an end was coming in the tap-tap-tap of the ever-approaching dawn.


End file.
